Re: A little food for thought

1. Nidal Hasan (the Ft. Hood shooter) lived in either Virginia (his state of residence prior to being sent to Ft. Hood) or Texas, neither of which has partisan registration. Therefore the claim that he was a "registered Democrat" is false. I do not know if he voted or how he voted, but I do know that unless he was registered in a state in which he did not reside, that the claim that he is a registered Democrat is FALSE.

2. Since Virginia does not have partisan registration there is also no way to tell whether Seung-Hui Cho was a Democrat, but again because there is no partisan registration in the state we can say that the claim that he is a registered Democrat is FALSE.

3. The allegation that James Holmes was registered Democrat was based on a Breitbart blogger Joel B. Pollack, who found voter registration records for a DIFFERENT James Holmes who was about the same age. Alex Jones’ Infowars and other right-wing websites then dutifully repeated the lie without verifying it. It was later determined that the Colorado Theater Shooter James Holmes was NOT registered to vote, as evidenced by this retraction: {Newly-released information on the suspect’s birthdate (which, as indicated in our initial report, was a slight mismatch), combined with new details Breitbart News has obtained about the suspect’s likely addresses, together suggest that the suspect may, in fact, not have been registered to vote.}. However, most of right-wing media continued to promote the lie without printing Breitbart sites retraction. The claim that James Holmes was a registered Democrat is FALSE.

4. The claim that Adama Lanza is a registered Democrat has been suggested based not on any evidence that he was registered as one, but on the rather dubious claim that because Connecticut has almost 2 to 1 Democratic registration over Republicans, he was probably a Democrat. (Claim: "Adam Lanza, NewtownConn murderer. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about a 2-1 ratio in Connecticut. The odds are therefore that the Lanza family are (sic) Democrats.") This of course is a bogus argument to begin with, but even if we were to make the claim that a mass shooter’s political affiliation must be the same as the majority of the people in his area, we can debunk this foolish idea by taking this shoddy analysis down to the local level. Yes, Connecticut voted for Barack Obama, BUT the city of Newtown voted for Mitt Romney. If we look at the results we find that Mitt Romney defeated Barack Obama in Newtown by 7451-6784 votes or 51.7 percent to 47 percent. Republican Senate candidate and Tea Party favorite Linda McMahon carried the city over Democrat Chris Murphy by an even larger margin. Add in the other information we have that Lanza’s mother was a “doomsday prepper” and a home schooler in a Republican-leaning city and we can pretty well dispense with the erroneous assumption that Lanza must have been a Democrat. We can therefore claim that with no evidence to support the claim, the assertion that Lanza was a Democrat is not demonstrated and that in the absence of any evidence it is likely FALSE.

5. Klebold and Harris of course were not old enough to vote and they had no apparent political affiliation. Allegations that they came from families of Democrats or liberal progressives appear to have no sources to substantiate those claims. What little ideology the boys demonstrated owed mostly to an admiration for Timothy McVeigh not Ted Kennedy. Harris’ father was a retired Air Force pilot and Eric Harris wanted to join the Marine Corps. The boys lived in Littleton, Colorado a relatively conservative and affluent suburb of Denver. The claim that their parents were Democrats is UNSUBSTANTIATED. Any suggestion that the two boys were Democrats is demonstrably FALSE.

Interestingly, Hedgecock and those on the far right have conveniently overlooked a number of cases where ideology is clearly right-wing. The acts below are instances of right-wing violence that are unequivocally committed by people who are openly hostile to liberalism. While this does not mean these killers are Republicans, it is quite clear that they are RIGHT-WINGERS and that they have far more in common with Mr. Hedgecock, Alex Jones and the other gun-toting conspiracy nuts on the right than with any evils associated with the Democratic Party or liberalism. In addition, to the list below is the obvious case of Timothy McVeigh, who I have not included because his crime was not committed with firearms. It was however, committed by a right-winger and the carnage was on a massive scale.